Ninety thousand women each year are diagnosed as having breast cancer and face the dual crisis of a life-threatening illness and disfiguring surgery. The proposed research would analyze the coping strategies used by women in recovering from a mastectomy; determine which ones are effective in reducing stress and improving patient recovery, and identify the types of women who use effective coping strategies and those who do not. Data for this research are available from a study soon to be completed for the National Cancer Institute. To investigate the coping function of affiliation--that is, contact with others who have a mastectomy-fifty volunteers who visit mastectomy patients in the hospital will be interviewed about the coping techniques they believe are useful and how they attempt to communicate these to patients. The analysis of coping techniques will focus on structural variables (age, race, ethnicity, income, education and stage of life cycle); contextual variables (conditions of the situation itself); and social interaction (specifically, affiliation). The usefulness of coping strategies will be evaluated by assessing whether they reduce emotional distress and whether they facilitate return to useful activities and social roles. The data available for the analysis were collected in one-hour interviews with 600 mastectomy patients between 18 and 65 years of age, without distant metastases, who reside in 17 counties in southeastern New York and had undergone surgery in some 200 hospitals between May 1978 and January 1979. The size and representativeness of the sample was made possible through collaboration with the Bureau of Cancer Control, New York Department of Health. In addition to questions concerning respondents' experiences during recovery and current physical and emotional status, the interview collected data on return to useful activities (e.g. work, leisure and other activities, sex life); support from family, friends and health care professionals; the patients' perceived adequacy of information and participation in self-help groups.